On Wedding Dinners and Honeymoons

Last night I attended a grand wedding dinner at a posh golf club. I arrived there at 7.30pm, but the lounge for the cocktail reception was less than half full. I knew, and other guests knew too, that dinner would not start punctually at 7.30 as stated on the invitation card. True enough, it was not until 8 that we were ushered into the hall and seated at our tables, and not until 8.45 were we served the first course!

I don't want to comment further about the rubber time for Chinese wedding dinners. I was thinking of somthing else.

While waiting for the dinner to start, my thought was about the grandeur of this wedding dinner.

It is not an exaggeration to say that nowadays would-be brides and bridegrooms and their parents would think nothing of spending lavishly on wedding dinners! And the amount of time they would have to spend to prepare for the event!

You want to have your son's wedding dinner at a 5-star hotel? Well, you have to plan it early, most likely one year in advance. Of course you also have to agree to the terms and charges dictated by the hotel management. Then your son will definitely want to engage a professional photographer to take all the wedding photos before and during the wedding day. Not satisfied with just taking wedding photos, he and the photographer would create a video show for the wedding dinner, showing his and his bride's childhood days, how they met, how the romance blossomed, etc, etc. But I think they are unlikely to bother whether their guests will enjoy watching the show or not.

Then who do you invite to the dinner? Most likely, you want to invite all your friends and relatives, especially those who can give you big angpows to help you defray the high cost of a grand wedding. You would expect them to be generous because you have always been generous in giving big angpows on occasions like this. You accept that it's the Chinese custom and tradition to hold a grand wedding dinner for your son. Right? No?

Back to the dinner. As I looked around the large ballroom with 70 tables filled with guests, I was impressed. This friend of mine is not rich,... works hard all his life; yet he had invited all his friends an relatives, even an MP (Member of Parliament) and a cabinet minister!

Undoubtedly, his son's wedding would cost him thousands of dollars. Was he worried about the total cost? I don't think so. He appeared happy, and confident that the angpows he would collect would help him defray all the costs, including a honeymoon trip for the newly wed at a holiday resort overseas.

.......................

My thought then turned to my wedding nearly 50 years ago.

There was no wedding dinner, not even at a small restaurant, for my relatives and friends. There was only a simple tea reception for my guests after the wedding ceremony, and it was held at a school hall without much decoration and using only available tables and chairs.

When Helen and I decided to get married, we had very little savings... only a few hundred dollars. So I sold my car, a bone shaker.... a British-made car called Mayflower, for about $1,700. After settling the car loan, I had only about $800 left to spend on my wedding. I bought the necessary pieces of furniture for my small bridal room. My father gave me $400. That was all the savings he had. He didn't have much money because he had given almost all his savings for my elder brother's big wedding dinner about 6 months earlier.

What about angpows? I can't remmember receiving them except the 400 dollars from my father. But I did get a number of wedding presents in kind ... tea sets, bedspreads, some jewellery, table lamps, photo albums and other household items.

We were married on the 14th of December, 1957.

A few days later, we went on a honeymoon trip to Malaya. With about 500 dollars in my pocket, we "tonpan" (hitched a ride) in my friend Chye Hock's Mini Minor to Taiping, a small town in Perak about 500 miles away from Singapore. On the way there we spent one night in Kuala Lumpur's Federal Hotel, then considered one of the few luxury hotels in the KL.

We also visited Ipoh before arriving in Taiping and stayed one night at a small hotel above a coffeeshop. The next day we took a day train to Penang. At that time, the Penang Bridge was not even planned, and travellers crossed the sea from the mainland to Penang Island by ferry.

We reached Penang's Georgetown at about 6pm and found to our dismay that all the hotels had been fully booked. We went to Rev. John Chua's parsonage for help. (Before Rev Chua was transferred to Penang, he was our pastor in Klang where I lived for quite a number of years.) As he had not been told of our trip earlier, he could not put us up at his parsonage, but he arranged for us to sleep at a small room in the church. That was how we spent our third honeymoon night in a church room with two canvas beds!

The next morning, we rented a car for our tour of the island. I was familiar with the roads and therefore had no problem driving around the island. That evening, we stayed at Park Hotel, a beach hotel located at Jalan Batu Ferringhi on North western coast. For the first time, we really could relax and enjoy our honeymoon. We visited some places of interest such as Kek Lok Si the Buddhist Pagoda, Snake Temple, Penang Hill and the Botanic Gardens. We were in Penang for three days.

On the last day, we took a ferry back to the mainland, and a connecting train took us to Tapah where we boarded a bus for the Cameron Highlands. I remember clearly the long bus journey up the mountains. It was an old and noisy bus, and the roads narrow and winding. Halfway, Helen was feeling faint when the bus suddenly stopped. The driver came out and opened the bonnet. He examined the radiator and slowly unscrewed the cap. There was loud hissing, but the driver wasn't worried at all. He took out a small pail and started collecting water from a little spring nearby to top up the radiator. The little break gave the passengers a chance to come out to stretch their limbs.

We arrived at a small town called Tanah Rata after 2.5 hours, and checked into a small hotel.

Our stay on the mountain resort was an enjoyable one. We wished we could stay there longer

than 3 days.

Our journey back was less hazardous. The same bus took us back to Tapah. We boarded a train to KL where we switched to a night train to Singapore. We arrived in Singapore early in the morning.

On the whole we had an enjoyable honeymoon.

We also had no regrets that we only had a tea reception on our wedding day.

What is important is that we spent within the limits. And we didn't owe anybody anything!

By all means, have a grand wedding if you can afford it, but its grandeur does not necessarily a happy marriage make.